Presentation reserved to audience above 16

"Piss and shit everywhere !" Thus begins this teenager's life in the hellish world of drugs and prostitution in late 70's Berlin.

Eight years before his successful adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn), Uli Edel took on the bestseller by Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck. A portrait of Berlin's underworld in the 70's, with disarming sincere acting by Natja Brunckhorst (later seen in Fassbinder's Querelle) and featuring David Bowie playing himself in a key scene. Cult and addictive !

Gaspar Noé

There are some mythical films that everyone knows by name but that only a happy few have seen : Christiane F. is one of them. Adapted from a teenage junkie prostitute's biography, this fabulous melodrama was a sensation in its day and a great commercial success all over the world. Practically invisible since, because of commercial rights issues, it remains the ultimate reference concerning the representation of the existential degradation caused by the needle's artificial paradises. It reminds of More, Requiem for a Dream, The Panic in Needle Park, and films by Fassbinder or Larry Clark. But Uli Edel's film has an extra beauty because it's one of the best on screen transpositions of passionate unlimited love (here between beings barely out of childhood), and also because it's a great document about the Berlin of the 70's and 80's like Midnight Cowboy or Taxi Driver were for New York. Heart wrenching, because of the true events described by the teenagers' flawless acting, this film would be impossible to shoot in today's much more prudish and sanctimonious world. The film's direction is admirable in its accuracy and power, and it's this film that was my main visual reference with my director of photography, set decorator and costume designer when shooting Climax. I told them: "I want my film to be as multicolored as Christiane F., but most of all I want to feel the omnipresent filth, the dirty walls and the pretty torn up clothes."